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Here is a Work in Progress of my Man At Arms. The head sculpt was started around the time that I got started in sculpting…back around early 2010. Was trying to aim for the Man At Arms that was designed by the 4 Horsemen and that came out on the 200X He Man and Motu cartoon.

Really paid no attention to symmetry. Just really wanted to make the head sculpt. I was pretty happy at the time. : )Here are some more shots with the hairstyle.

I finished up the sculpts and baked it. I felt I did a pretty good job and hoped to sculpt the body a little later. Almost a year and a half later, started to take a stab at wax. During my time with wax, I’ve begun to the learn the importance of symmetry. And once I took a look at Man At Arms in the mirror, he looked like a reflection of Man At Arms in one of the distortion mirrors. So now, I literally have mirrors around my desk to ensure symmetry. Here’s a wax casting of the clay sculpt.

Started on fixing areas such as the eyes, cheeks, the jaws… almost everything was symmetrically off. So after scraping and dripping away a bit more and some cleaning, here are some more pics.

Eyes didn’t seem right to me… looked off. I’ve seen sculptors that leave eyes this way… and after it’s painted, it looks great! But I still didn’t like it. I left it as is to see if it would hit me… so in the meantime, I focused on how I was going to design the hair. At first, I thought of splitting the hair, since he had it in a pony tail, that that’s what the stripe across his hair was….a part line. But I didn’t like the look of it… and from what I’ve seen in the comics and cartoon… it looked like a strip of grey hair like Reed Richards. So I decided to go with that.

Here is the last WIP of the head. The final with the final look of the hair is on the Upper Torso Post.

Here is the next post of my set of past works. It’s Batman. : ) Very strange how new sculptors attempt to make this guy as their 1st or 2nd sculpt. He is really cool to sculpt. Going to try and keep this post simple and short as this was my 2nd sculpt.

I started sculpting the Bruce Wayne head while I was working on Hulk version 1. Just to take a break from the ginormous sculpt and to try my hand at sculpting a human face. For my second head sculpt, I felt pretty proud of it. There was no reference used… just came up with this look from all the Batman comics I used to read during the 80’s. Tried to go after the classic 80’s look haircut. Here’s a few pics:

My goal was to do a switch out head for my Batman sculpt….one of Bruce Wayne and one of Batman. After I finished up with the head, I attempted to do the body. At this point, realizing how bad my hulk armature turned out, I did alittle more research and found the John Brown dvd. Seeing him actually create an armature was more helpful than reading articles and seeing pics of someone making one… just cuz it didn’t make sense to me. Here’s my first actual planned armature:

I forgot the picture that I did the measurements of to get to this armature. But it was meant to be 1/4 scale to compliment my Sideshow Marvel statues. Thought it would be cool to have a DC v Marvel…. DC sculpted by me and Marvel sculpted by Sideshow. Here are few pics of the next stage, the bulking process:

I know … my room is a mess. I was a action figure collector…. now a statue collector. I sold off a lot of my collection to fund my statue collection and most of all to support my sculpting addiction! Okay… so… back to Bats! You can already see the proportions being a bit off… big upper torso and small legs. The measurements were taken from a cartoon picture that I had. Going from 2D to 3D was going to be difficult. Here is the final stage of the body:

Yeah… it was off. I figured I’d come back to fixing the proportions after I attempted my first Batman head sculpt. Nothing was baked yet at this point. I was going for the Batman head with a cartoon look. No real details but just how you saw him in comics… no lines, no features. Here is the baked head sculpt:

The biggest problem I had in doing this was keeping it in scale with my Bruce Wayne head. As I was creating the Batman head, I tried to sculpt it and maintain the size of the Bruce Wayne head. This was pretty difficult to do as the head seemed to get bigger every time I sculpted a facial feature. But it came out close.

Once baked, I attached the head to the body.

After seeing it attached…. he looked like a stocky guy and not at all like the tall boxer build Super hero I grew up with. So… here comes another lesson. Elongating armature to correct anatomy proportion. Super duper annoying! Shortening the wire is much much simpler. Always maintain some extra wire in the armature so you can shorten or elongate your proportions. I wanted to elongate the armature wire in the legs to make him look taller. So I removed the clay on the legs, cut the wire at the knees, added more wire for more length, bonded it with Apoxie and went from there. Here is the elongated version:

Elongated the legs and felt that it looked good with the Batman head. Unfortunately, not the case with the Bruce Wayne head. He ended up looking pinheaded with the Bruce head. Super Aggravation! Every time I fixed one problem, I would run into more problems. *sigh*… luckily nothing was baked yet. Not being happy with this sculpt at all… removed the clay and started over from scratch.

The creation of Batman Version 2 of 3 will be posted soon… I hope. : )

Stay tuned for this Sunday night… will have updates on my Man At Arms leg!

The left leg has been started this week. Still working on his belt and the armor of the leg. Once I have that completed… I should be able to start on the more organic area (The fur below the armor). I’m still trying to figure out how I am going to lay out the armor and how the belt is going to be placed. Nothing too exciting of an update… but an update nonetheless. : )

Here is the initial start of the leg. That grey area around the hip is aves apoxie. Kind of did a rough as to where the belt would be but raised it above where the hip so that the upper torso can sit in to that raised area. (Sorry if that didn’t make sense).

And the the rest of the pics are just the gradual building of wax, smoothing and building and refining.

Stay tuned for more updates next Sunday on Man At Arms. I will also be posting more past works before then as well.

Here is just a quick recap on my second reincarnation of the Hulk. I tried to sculpt this or build up this piece as a whole… but veered off again. Just another example of poor planning and not really knowing how I was going to cut up the statue. It was definitely a fun piece to do as I felt I had a little more confident in how I was going to execute this piece.

Not really going to post too many pics. The head is the first sculpt of the Hulk head. I just added more hair.

Here are some WIP pics:

I think I got carried away bulking this guy up. At around this point, I had cut the sculpt up to bake. Here are some close ups of the parts:

And here is the final:

In the end, this piece ended up going to the scrap heaps again. Symmetry wise, the face and body was off… and he seemed pin headed to me. I felt guilty to my friend to sell it to him. So I ended returning his money and cutting a V into the upper torso with the head and made a cast of the bust to give to him.

You all may notice that throughout my posts, scale, proportion, and symmetry is a big thing to me. I still need to work on alot of things… but I believe getting these three areas right is a good way to start moving in the right direction.

Thanks for looking and check back later today as I’ll have some update on the legs of my Man At Arms.

I started sculpting the Hulk head around this time in Nov 2009. The body was started up about early 2010. My friend had asked me to do this for him as a commission and this is how my venture into sculpting started.

The head was a very very difficult challenge for me. I knew that going in just because I was not too confident in sculpting faces when I was customizing figures. But I learned the value of patience at trying to work through getting the face I was looking for. Sorry I don’t have many pics to show for this post. My previous laptop that carried all the pics crashed on me and I lost all the WIP pics.

The face was based off of the 2 pack figure from Marvel legends. I consider this the best version of Hulk ever. The body sculpt was inspired by the Hulk and Wolverine statue that was done I believe by Pearl Thunder on Statue forums. That was a piece of great art work and it was huge. As a beginner … I was a bit too ambitious trying to emulate their statue.

As you can see, my setup in holding my sculpt was very very poorly made. I basically had the hulk hanging from a thread rod with a wire. I had no idea what I was doing. Strange this was, was that I did do a lot of research into armature building. But all that research didn’t mean much until I actually dove in and learned from each sculpt how I should change my setup and armature building to see what would work for me. My armature was measured by printing out a large 20 inch picture of the figure and measuring the picture.

Sorry to blab…. here are some pics:

Great stuff right? I thought it looked good at the time. One very important thing I learned from this as well was the process of pushing clay around. Specifically how to smooth the muscle groups so that was it blocks of muscles but that there was a smooth transition between them. The pics above are basically blocks of clay put onto the sculpt. After looking at some body builder magazines and the internet for back references, I tried pretty hard to imitate the muscles. After a month or two of struggling to do so… here is a pic:

Using a brush with rubbing alcohol and my fingers, it was amazing to me at what I could do with clay. Here are some more pics:

So here is another mistake I made for this statue which is sculpting it in parts. Huge Huge mistake. It was too big and overwhelming as a beginner sculptor and too big to fit into my oven. I figured I’d just do it in parts. Well… here are some more pics:

Changed up the upper torso a bit… and wanted to change the pose because the sculpt was too heavy for my set up to support. I thought it looked cool like this. I thought …eh… sculpting it in parts isn’t too tough. I just had to focus on the legs now.

And there you have it. It just got bigger and bigger and I had no idea what I was doing. Nothing looked right and after a couple of months of this… I said screw it and it was scrapped. I told my friend that I would restart again. Not bad for a first sculpt eh? : )

Had some spare time during the holidays so here are some more posts. Wanted to go through my process of building up Man At Arms base body. After nearly 2 years of trying to figure sculpting out, I think I finally got it into my thick head of basic armature building, setting up a sturdy setup to ensure the armature isn’t loosely hanging around, scale issues, and learning how to plan (For casting and molding, interchangeable body parts and part fitting).

Here is a WIP of my armature. Sorry I don’t have more pics… I lost the files when my computer crashed and these files I had somehow managed to find.

First off, I have so many thanks to EPang (Placed 2nd on the ConceptArt contest that I entered MM – Super sculptor – Check out his Spiderman and his clothed Superman (Super Amazing!) and extremely extremely helpful) on Statue forums in pointing the flaws in my sculpts and pointing me in the right direction! This guy is pure awesomeness… when he has something to say about my sculpt, I listen and implement. He’s right 99.9 % of the time. One of my issues with all my past sculpts was body proportion and scale as you will notice in my past works post and future past works posts. He directed me over to the Gore Gore Gore group site where they have body type references that you can use to determine scale. I took his suggestion and created my armature based on the body type reference. It’s the skeleton drawing you see in the pics. I essentially had the head already made so I enlarged the head on the body type pic and enlarged to the size of my head sculpt. The sculpt came out to be 1/4 scale… roughly 18-19 inches tall standing. Listening to EPang in using this is the best thing I have ever done!!

Visting the Gore site also led me to revisit alot of their tutorials. The tutorials done by Martin was invaluable!! Especially in armature building and using invisible string in to cutting parts for molding and casting at a later point. You’ll notice the strings with tape at the end that are dangling from the sculpt. The fitting and cuttin of the brass rods I actually saw in John Browns DVD. But Martin has great tutorials that I visit and learn almost every day… seems obsessive… but I feel like I learn something new everytime while I’m sculpting.

Here are the first set of turnarounds:

The big difference with this sculpt compared to my past sculpts is that I didn’t rush to detail parts. I tried to focus on covering and building up the sculpt as one. It was difficult. Second big difference is I used a huge mirror while I was building up the body in clay. This was a huge eye opener for me. There is a huge difference in the way a sculpt looks in the mirror. I thought checking for symmetry only applied to the face… but apparently it applies to the entire sculpt. This was a huge blow and letdown on my past sculpts as I thought they looked somewhat decent. After looking at them in the mirror, they were totally off…it was very disheartening.

So my goal was to make this sculpt look correct. Here are a few more WIP pics.

Some more layering over the Sculpey with a combination of Super Sculpey and Sculpey Firm to get that nice firm grey color:

I wasn’t too focused on getting the anatomy too clean. I just wanted to make sure that they were placed correctly (and hopefully they are cuz nobody had said anything) cuz the body was going to be armored up in wax anywayz.

I don’t know what else to say about this buildup other than I learned a tremendous amount! The pointing arm was raised a bit if you take a look at the upper torso posts. Here are the final WIP Pics before the bake:

The strings that you see dangling are the areas where the sculpt was cut. Cutting the sculpt easy made it extremely extremely easy to put back together after baking. I’ll go into the troubles I had when I post my Batman and MM statue about trying to put the parts together just by cutting with a saw.

Hey everyone! Here’s a few pics of one of my past works. It’s the Martian Manhunter. I entered this sculpt into the ConceptArt.org contest where Tim Bruckner, the Shiflett Brothers, and Zach Oat were the judges. The goal was to create a sculpt on a deadline of our favorite super heroes in action or whatever action that we selected. We basically had to record the process and then submit. We all got little reviews on our sculpts. Even though I didn’t place, just getting a review from Tim (it was very direct and he pointed out the flaws in my sculpt) was totally worth it. But, a few members of the StatueForum board had entered and 2 of them, who are very well known forum members, placed 1st and 2nd! They were both excellent statues!

This was my 3rd character sculpt…. but technically… my 6th sculpt. Basically, a couple of characters that I’ve sculpted went through a couple of different reincarnations. So each reincarnation I consider a sculpt. The sculpt was roughly 22inches… and trying to complete this in 30 days was difficult. So I ended up submitting a incomplete sculpt. : (

Anyhow, here are some Work in Progress pics:

At the time, I was pretty happy with the sculpt. It was supposed to be an interpretation of a scene from JLI that was drawn by Kevin Maguire (Ass Kicking Artist – One of my all time favorites). Scale was measured by the Batman sculpt that I was in the process of completing at that time. I basically knew that MM was taller than Bats. Here is the comparison:

The head sculpt I somewhat checked for symmetry in a mirror. It was my first time, so it was challenging to see what I thought was MM when I looked at it did not look like MM in the mirror. Also, the pose was a bit awkward and proportions were massively off. I did not use a mirror at all for the body sculpt.

Here is the final submission ‘Poster Shot:

He’s basically holding a cookie and looking to see something wierd that was happening to his right side. That item in his left hand was supposed to be a milk carton.

Here is the somewhat finished sculpt cut up into pieces in the hopes that I would create a couple of switch out head as well as switch out arms for a pose more serious:

The hands that were sculpted for MM was actually the first set of hands I had ever sculpted. It was actually quite fun. I referenced my hand alot as I was sculpting. I believe each hand took literally 7 -9 hours to sculpt. Here are some detailed pics of the hands:

After the costume details were worked out, baked, and keys developed for each cutup part, here is the statue assembled:

Developing keys and putting the statue together after it was cut up and baked was quite a fiasco. This is where the importance of planning during the amature stages comes in very very handy. I’d just like to say that anybody attempting to do this, go to the GoreGoreGore site and read Martin’s tutorial on how they cut their pieces and plan during their armature stages. This helped out enormously when I cut up Man At Arms to work on individually.

So where is this statue now? It is actually sitting on my shelf in parts. After starting in wax, I wanted to do the same thing for MM that I did for my Bats… basically make a mold and cast him in wax. I know now that that is not going to happen. After working on my Man At Arms and my Bats in wax, I realized how important proportion or scale is as well as symmetry (sculpting in front of a mirror is) is to sculpting. And MM was way off on many things. So…as of now, he remains to be kept in parts until I decide to one day assemble him and keep him as a personal reminder of lessons learned.